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Taking Silver

Oh, well. I never really wanted to be Achilles anyway.

It's the classic hero's choice: a short, heroic life, but remembered forever, or a long, uneventful one, and then forgotten.

Given the choice, which would you take?

Remember AIDS?

If I'd had the heroic beauty that I always wanted, I'd probably be dead by now.

These days, I go to more funerals than weddings. When the phone rings, I think: Uh oh, who now?

I've stayed lean, though. Because I neither dress nor act my age, from a distance I tend to read as a lot younger than I actually am. From a distance, I still see them looking.

Hey: if life is an Olympic event, I'm happy taking silver.

So: a friend invited me to a sacrifice. A real one: you know, killing an animal. Blood, all that.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention: I'm vegetarian. Been that way for more than 50 years now.

Am I going? You bet.

Will I eat any? Um...ask me again later.

No matter what kind of -vore you are, others die so you can eat them and live.

It's not the killing, it's how you kill.

I've said for years that one of the reasons why I don't eat meat—besides, frankly, not liking it much—is that I'm not willing to eat something that hasn't been killed properly: i.e., in a sacred way.

Has the hunter said the prayers and made the offerings?

Does the sacrificer know what she's doing?

Has the animal been killed respectfully and cleanly?

Well, now the bristles hit the breeze. Were these just words of convenience, or did I really mean them?

When I lived briefly in London back in 1990, I roved the city at pretty much all hours of the day and night, and can't recall ever having felt in danger.

Well, except once.

We tend to think of Classical sculpture as pure, austere: all white surfaces and rippling marble. But, of course, the ancestors knew it as far otherwise: painted with bright colors that strike us today as garish.

(Of course, viewed as the ancestors would have seen them—by flickering firelight or the revelatory sunlight of Greece—they don't look garish at all.)

Same with Classical drama. Back in the day, those soaring, searing tragedies were interspersed with comic relief skits known as satyr plays: raucous, bawdy, earthy.

(This vision of balanced life tells you something pretty profound about the ancients and, indeed, about the paganisms generally, but let's lay that by for now.)

The tragedies, of course, with their deep human pathos, survived. No one bothered to save any of those throw-away satyr plays, though—hey, they're just comic relief, right?—so for years they were entirely lost to us.

Then, in the 1890s, a couple of British archaeologists named Grenfall and Hunt, digging a rubbish dump outside the ancient city of Oxyrynchus in Egypt, discovered fragments of Sophocles' 5th-century BCE satyr play, The Ichneutae.

British playwright Tony Harrison's 1988 The Trackers of Oxyrynchus melded the reconstructed satyr play itself with the story of Grenfall and Hunt's archaeological expedition. Though the play itself is a brilliant achievement, its stars are (of course) the satyrs, who athletically clog-dance their way through it more-or-less naked, with cute-grotesque snub-nosed satyr masks, big bouncing phalli (fake) and rippling, muscular butts (real).

Luckily for me, who had always wanted to see it, the show was remounted in 1990 at the Royal National Theatre.

That's how I came to be wandering South Bank that evening.

"The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction."

Josef Goebbels, 1939

It sounds kind of like a bad joke.

Minos sits on the Griffin Throne.

King Solomon sits on the Lion Throne.

The Shah (bad cess to him) sits on the Peacock Throne.

So where does the King of the Witches sit?

(Jeopardy theme plays.)

Well, on his butt, of course.

In 1966, Alex Sanders was (controversially) crowned King of the Witches.

(Well, King of Some Witches, anyway.)

This raises an interesting question.

When Kings Were Kings, and Shields Were Shields

 Och, shades of Alex Sanders.*

In 1995, the Théodsmen of Winland (America = Old Norse Vínland) together raised Garman Lord on a shield, thus making him King of Winland.

Well, King of Théodish Winland, anyway.

In 2022 Lord stepped down from the giftstool (= throne) of Winland, and the Théodsmen together raised Thórbeorht Éaldorblótere on a shield, thus making him the second King of Théodish Winland.

Well, second sitting king, anyway.

Raising someone to kingship literally, not by coronation or by enthronement, but by lifting him on a shield, is a hoary Germanic custom attested by several Classical writers.

Talk about articulate symbolism. The king is the shield—protector—of the people, but it is the people—symbolized by the dright ( = warband) that uphold the king. Lifting someone on a shield is a pretty profound image of mutual dependence.

We may elevate you above us, but it's a contingent elevation.

Beware of a fall.

I don't often catch my friend and colleague Théodsman (and lore-master) Hildiwulf Scop out in matters of ancient Germanic lore, which he knows backwards and forwards, with a comprehensiveness that I can only describe as Talmudic.

(“We're the Orthodox Jews of Heathenry,” he tells me, which comparison itself has much to tell.)

Ah, but. When he promptly answers “Sitting” to my question, “When the king at his king-making is raised on the shield, is he standing or sitting?” I can only find myself in disagreement.

I've got documentation, too.

Because—wisely—they didn't trust their compatriots, the emperors of Byzantium hired Germanic mercenaries to protect them (the so-called Varangian—literally, "barbarian"—Guard), and numerous Byzantine kings were raised to their kingship in the Germanic way—on a shield.

Byzantines being Byzantines—i.e. nearly as self-obsessed as modern pagans—there is, of course, ample documentation—even illustrations—of this rite.

All of them depict the king standing on the shield.

Hildiwulf's answer may reflect current Théodish practice, but that's not how the ancestors did it.

When what we do today differs from ancestral precedent, what then? This question is inescapable for the modern pagan, and brooks no single answer. Certainly our responsibility here is to be honest, and to ask ourselves the hard questions.

Sometimes there's fit reason for the difference. In these overfed days, I suspect, kings tend to be a little more, um, ample than they used to be.

My friend opens the door.

“Hi,” I say, “I'm from Aradia's Witnesses. I'm here today to discuss the Book of Shadows.”

My friend laughs.

“Did you ever come to the right place,” she says. “Come on in.”

It's an old joke: What's the difference between a JW and a Wiccan?